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Examples

In the 1830s Charles Babbage got serious about automating the computation and printing of mathematical tables, and started imagining a kind of universal “analytical engine”, which, as Ada Lovelace described it, could “weave algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves”.

And many of the notions which form a part of the train of our thoughts are hardly realized by us at the time, but, like numbers or algebraical symbols, are used as signs only, thus lightening the labour of recollection.

And if we go on in this way, with everybody, intellectuals, artists, government, industrialists and workers all frantically killing off the last human feeling, the last bit of their intuition, the last healthy instinct; if it goes on in algebraical progression, as it is going on: then ta-tah! to the human species!